![]() ![]() Karapiru’s wanderings eventually led him out of the hills and into a settled area of plowed fields and pasturelands, dotted with homes and outbuildings. But for all he suffered, the sparkle in his eyes and the sense of wonder with which he recounted his ordeal betrayed no trace of bitterness or resentment. “I felt great sadness for my family,” Karapiru said. It was full of fish!” Still, he endured long bouts of thirst and hunger-and the unimaginable loneliness of years without human contact. He followed a line of rugged hills that led south, surviving by his wits, hunting wild animals with a long bow and arrows he fashioned from the forest. He traveled by night and slept by day to avoid detection. Bereft of his loved ones and suffering searing pain, Karapiru set off into the forests to get away, believing he was the lone survivor of the attack. “I was hit in the back,” he said, raising his T-shirt to show a cluster of small lumps close to his spine where buckshot had lodged. His wife was cut down, along with their infant daughter. “They shot at us as we ran away,” Karapiru said in 2017, recalling the ambush. The Indigenous rights group Survival International has called the Awá the “world’s most threatened tribe.” Today, up to a hundred Awá, out of the total population of roughly 600, still roam shrinking pockets of woodlands in Maranhão as isolated nomads. President Jair Bolsonaro and his allies in the legislature have ramped up efforts to roll back protections of Indigenous territories and eliminate some reserves altogether. Indigenous leaders fear that isolated tribes such as the Awá-as many as 70 separate groups scattered throughout the Brazilian Amazon-are once again facing heightened risk of violent dispossession. A consummate field agent and Amazonian explorer, he is considered one of the foremost experts on Brazil’s Indigenous people and a leading advocate for the protection of isolated tribes. This kind of practice continues to this day.” Possuelo served as the director of the Department of Isolated Indians within Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, for nearly two decades, interrupted by a two-year stint as president of the agency. “So they went out to attack Karapiru’s group. “Ranchers need to get rid of the presence of Indians to gain title to the land they are trying to take,” said Sydney Possuelo in an interview in Brasilia in 2017. The attack launched him on a decade-long odyssey that rights advocates call a testament to the resilience of Brazil’s Indigenous peoples in the face of suffering and cruelty inflicted by colonizers. Karapiru was the father of an infant daughter and a young boy when ranchers ambushed him and his family one day in the late 1970s. ![]() They were mad because we were passing through their fences. He spoke in Awá as a fellow tribesman translated to Portuguese. “The white men wanted to kill Indians,” Karapiru told me when I visited Tiracambu on assignment for National Geographic in 2017. Almost overnight, it was as if the Awá had become trespassers in their own land. By the early 1970s, they were fanning out into the forests, snatching up land, fencing it off with barbed wire. It didn’t take long for waves of settlers and ranchers to follow. To haul the ore east to the Atlantic coast for export, a 550-mile-long railroad was built across Maranhão, splitting the Awá’s territory in two. But in the 1960s, the world’s largest deposits of iron ore were discovered in the neighboring state of Pará. In those days, the outside world had barely touched the ancestral homelands of the Awá, which sprawled across much of Maranhão. Karapiru was born into a nomadic community of hunter-gatherers sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when the Awá were still uncontacted by outsiders. “He is emblematic of their whole struggle and saga and everything they went through.” ![]() “His story epitomizes what the Awá and other isolated groups went through, especially in the face of a moving frontier,” says Louis Forline, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, who has dedicated his career to studying the tribe and advocating for them. Karapiru’s death in an isolation ward, far from his loved ones and his people, carried echoes of the suffering and loneliness that marked his life and his extraordinary tale of survival. He was evacuated to the city of Santa Inés where took his last breaths. Although fully vaccinated, he developed severe symptoms of the disease while in his adoptive village of Tiracambu, where he had lived for the past several years. Karapiru, whose name means Hawk in his native Awá, died in a hospital in the Amazonian state of Maranhão on July 16. The Indigenous survivor of a deadly ambush that sent him wandering alone for 10 years across 900 miles of rugged highlands in eastern Brazil has died of COVID-19 symptoms, according to fellow tribespeople and rights activists. ![]()
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